How We Rate Wine: The Blue Book Value Method

Every value pick on Wine Blue Book answers one question: how much wine are you getting for your money? We answer it with two numbers that anyone can check: the scores professional critics have published for a wine, and what that wine costs at US stores. This page explains how we put them together.

Important: We don’t taste or test the wines we recommend. Our picks are research-based. When we describe how a wine tastes, we summarize what published reviews say and link to them. We never write as if we had the glass in front of us.

Why we don’t taste the wines

Tasting well takes trained palates, consistent conditions and, ideally, blind tastings of many bottles side by side. Established publications already do this, and they publish their scores. We think readers are better served if we gather that evidence carefully and compare it with price than if we added one more personal opinion. This was also the idea behind the original Wine Blue Book newsletter, which compared critics’ scores with prices to find good-value bottles (read more in our guide to how wine ratings work).

Step 1: Choose wines you can actually buy

A great score is no use if you can’t find the bottle. We start with wines that are sold widely in the US: at national retailers, large wine chains, and stores such as Costco, Trader Joe’s and Aldi. We always name the vintage we are talking about, because the score and the price can change from one year to the next.

Step 2: Collect published critic scores

For each wine and vintage, we look for scores from professional critics and publications that taste wines and publish their ratings, such as Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and The Wine Advocate. For each score we record:

• the publication or critic,
• the score and the scale it uses,
• the vintage it applies to,
• the date it was published.

When a wine has several scores, we use the middle (median) score, so one unusually high or low rating doesn’t decide the verdict. A median that falls between two bands of the table below (for example 89.5) counts in the lower band: we never round a score up. When a wine has only one professional score, we say so on the page. Scores on a 20-point or 5-star scale are never converted into 100 points. We show them as published.

Community ratings from apps and sites where many drinkers rate wines, such as Vivino and CellarTracker, are a useful second opinion. We may mention them, clearly labeled, but they never replace a professional score in our verdict.

Step 3: Check the US price

We record the typical shelf price of the wine at two or more US retailers and note the date we checked. We ignore one-day sales and member-only deals. In our store guides (Costco, Trader Joe’s, Aldi), the price that matters is that store’s own: we take it from the store’s website, or, when the store doesn’t list its wines online, from a dated price published by a named source. Prices vary by state and by store, so treat ours as a guide to what the wine usually costs, not a quote.

Step 4: Give the value verdict

The verdict compares the critic score with the price. These thresholds are our own editorial choice, and we review them once a year:

Critic score (100-point scale)	Great Value at	Good Value at
93 and above	$30 or less	$45 or less
90 to 92	$20 or less	$30 or less
88 to 89	$15 or less	$20 or less
85 to 87	$10 or less	$14 or less
Below 85	Not picked	Not picked

For boxes and other large formats, we apply the thresholds to the price of 750 ml, one standard bottle: a 3-liter box holds four bottles’ worth, so a $20 box counts as $5 a bottle.

A wine that scores 91 points and usually sells for $18, for example, is a Great Value. The same wine at $27 would be a Good Value. At $35 it would not make our list, however good it is, because other wines with similar scores cost less.

Step 5: Write it up honestly

Each pick on the site shows:

• the wine, vintage and producer,
• its critic score or scores, with the publication named,
• the price we found and the date we checked it,
• the value verdict,
• what the wine is like and what to pair it with, in our own words, based on the published reviews we cite.

Every article ends with a Sources box that lists the publications and stores we relied on, so you can check them yourself.

What we never do

• Claim to have tasted a wine. You won’t read “we tasted” or “in our testing” on this site.
• Accept payment or free bottles in exchange for a pick or a better verdict.
• Let commissions decide. Some links to Amazon earn us a commission (see our affiliate disclosure), and they point to things like glasses, openers and storage rather than to the wines. A link never changes a verdict.
• Copy critics’ tasting notes. We describe wines in our own words and link to the original review.

Updates and corrections

Prices move and new vintages replace old ones. We recheck the price of every pick at least every three months, update the date on the page, and replace picks that are no longer sold or no longer meet the thresholds. If you see a price or a score that looks wrong, please tell us. We correct mistakes as soon as we confirm them.

Wine is for adults of legal drinking age (21 in the US). Please drink responsibly.